Barbara: "We have to understand what we're looking at here. We're looking at big government, big business and big labor getting together to screw the taxpayers. That's what they decided to do, that's what they've done, and now the Legislature comes in and, horrors, they have to say something because there's water flowing into the tunnel ..."

Chet Curtis: "Keeping these tunnels safe will require constant inspection and an ongoing patching program. Where's that money going to come from ten, fifteen years down the road?"

Top executives of the company managing the Big Dig, testifying at a packed State House hearing yesterday, apologized for lapses that led to a massive leak in the Interstate 93 northbound tunnel wall on Sept. 15, and agreed to consider the creation of an unusual escrow fund to pay for future leak repairs....

"We apologize for our mistakes," [Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff chairman John] MacDonald said of the leak, which occurred in a section of the tunnel wall that Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff engineers knew to be structurally flawed when it was built in 1999....

While Amorello testified that the Big Dig's budget has built-in contingencies for leak repairs and other unanticipated costs, he refused to say that the project's $14.6 billion cost estimate would hold until construction is finished late next year....

In written testimony, a top official in the US Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General labeled the work of an
Amorello-appointed cost-recovery legal team "anemic" and called on the Legislature to create a bipartisan independent commission to investigate the cause of the leaks, who is responsible, and ensure "that they bear the costs of the leaks and not the taxpayers." Over roughly two years the cost-recovery team has recouped $3.5 million, out of more than $700 million in identified cost overruns attributed to mistakes or omissions....

"The Commonwealth must move expeditiously in identifying a solution," Ritt's testimony said. "If the leak problems are not resolved before the project's scheduled completion in September 2005, the Commonwealth may be saddled with significant maintenance and repair costs." ...

"What we are concerned with is problems down the road, when you have packed up and gone," said Senator Robert L.
Hedlund, a Weymouth Republican.

Matthew J. Amorello looked nervous as he arrived at a packed State House hearing room yesterday morning. As the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority chairman sat down just before 10:30 a.m., he was sweating. He pulled out a white handkerchief and dabbed at his face repeatedly: his forehead, under his eyes, above his lip, and behind his ears.

Amorello has been under fire since last month, when Governor Mitt Romney called for his resignation after disclosure that the Big Dig's tunnels have hundreds of leaks.

But his appearance yesterday before lawmakers looked at times like the kind of cozy meeting among friends that has fueled public frustration over the $14.6 billion project.

Amorello's interrogators had reason to be friendly. The turnpike chief served with some of them as a state senator in the 1990s, and he still has firm friends on Beacon Hill, including Senate President Robert E. Travaglini....

Some expressed displeasure when Amorello and other turnpike officers admitted that they still had to rely mostly on Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff oversight of the project and that a slurry-wall leak like the one that sent water gushing onto the roadway on Sept. 15 could happen again.

A firm that lobbies for Big Dig contractor
Bechtel/Parsons-Brinckerhoff is preparing a fund-raiser for newly installed House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi next week, as the company weathers the political fallout from the discovery of leaks in the tunnel project....

But the speaker sees no problem with the O'Neill fund-raiser, his spokeswoman said yesterday....

"We have 2.6 billion ... do I hear three, three,
three ... do I hear five? We have five billion, do I hear ten, ten
billion! Do I hear twelve, twelve billion, we have twelve! Thirteen
billion, thirteen ... we have thirteen, do I hear fourteen, fourteen
billion ... we have fourteen billion! Going once, going twice ... do I
hear fifteen billion ...?"

The Big Dig: the longest-running auction with the
biggest price tag of any public works project in United States history.
And the bidding isn't over yet, taxpayers.

As Barbara responded last evening to the question of
where that money will come from -- "From the taxpayers, I'll tell you that right now."

Big Government, Big Business and Big Labor have all come together in a conspiracy to wreak havoc on state and national taxpayers.

Some fear that it could sink if not the ship of state then a fair number of its automobiles and citizens when enough water pours into the Big Dig's tunnels via their myriad leaks.

More likely, we taxpayers will be slowly drowning in fees and taxes to cover the cost of the repairs, on top of the cost of the Big Dig itself, which as of this date is $14.6 billion. To put that amount in perspective: It's roughly $3 for every year that Earth has been in existence.

When asked last night if someone was taking payoffs to cover up the problems, Barbara responded, "I see no evidence of
that. You don't need it, this is just government screwing-up without corruption being even necessary."

No evidence of corruption ... yet.

So prepare to pay for decades to come for this
biggest of government screw-ups.

Chet Curtis: "Why does it seem that the members of this committee who are holding the
hearings seem so surprised by this?"

Barbara: "It's their turn to get up there and say something aside from 'it's all our
fault because we created this public authority and let them have total responsibility
without any oversight from anybody who's elected in this state.' Everyone likes to
forget that the Legislature is the one who creates public authorities so that they can
wash their hands of everything that goes wrong and say 'hey, that's a public
authority and has nothing to do with us'..."

"We have to understand what we're looking at here. We're looking at big government,
big business and big labor getting together to screw the taxpayers. That's what they
decided to do, that's what they've done, and now the Legislature comes in and,
horrors, they have to say something because there's water flowing into the tunnel ..."

Chet Curtis: "Keeping these tunnels safe will require constant inspection and an
ongoing patching program. Where's that money going to come from ten, fifteen years
down the road?"

Top executives of the company managing the Big Dig, testifying at a packed State House hearing yesterday, apologized for lapses that led to a massive leak in the Interstate 93 northbound tunnel wall on Sept. 15, and agreed to consider the creation of an unusual escrow fund to pay for future leak repairs.

The conciliatory remarks constituted the first admission of a major mistake by Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff since engineering work began on the project two decades ago.

In addition to the apology, Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff chairman John MacDonald said the firm would pay, along with the construction firms involved, for the cost of repairing the wall damaged by the September leak, and made the same pledge to cover the bill for inspecting thousands of additional wall panels for possible flaws in coming weeks.

"We apologize for our mistakes," MacDonald said of the leak, which occurred in a section of the tunnel wall that Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff engineers knew to be structurally flawed when it was built in 1999.

MacDonald expressed openness to the establishment of the escrow fund, proposed by Senator Steven A.
Baddour, cochairman of the Legislature's Joint Transportation Committee, which held the hearings. Baddour is pushing for the fund to make sure that money is available to continue leak repairs even after Bechtel Corp. of San Francisco and Parsons Brinckerhoff of New York leave town when construction of the Big Dig is complete next year.

Yesterday's testimony, unlike so many past State House appearances by Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff executives throughout the long and controversial history of the $14.6 billion project, was a stark departure for a company that repeatedly insisted that it has "met or exceeded its contractual obligations" in all regards, despite massive cost overruns and construction delays.

At first, MacDonald resisted the escrow fund idea, saying it would be unnecessary.

"We are convinced that when the project is done it will meet all standards for being dry," said MacDonald.

But after being pressed on the issue by Baddour and later by the House chairman of the committee, Representative Joseph F. Wagner, a Chicopee Democrat, MacDonald relented, agreeing to discuss the matter with the lawmakers at an unspecified date.

Baddour, a Methuen Democrat, told MacDonald and other Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff executives he was pleased that the company took responsibility, but said, "I'm disappointed that it took this committee to force you to take responsibility for mistakes for the first time in the history of the project."

Calling Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff "the epitome of Teflon," Wagner said the firm has been expert at deflecting blame to construction contractors, the state or others. "It's always someone else's fault," he said. "Nothing ever sticks to you."

Wagner asked MacDonald whether Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff expected that its share of the blame in the Sept. 15 leak would be more or less than 50 percent of the estimated $250,000-to-$500,000 repair cost.

"Less," said MacDonald.

"You do a pretty good job of placing the problem at the feet of others," Wagner said.

Wagner then took exception to a letter he received from Bechtel/Parsons
Brinckerhoff, dated Nov. 19, after Globe stories uncovering the leak problem. The letter stated that the company was still investigating what caused the Sept. 15 leak, even though company engineers were aware the wall section had significant construction flaws that would make it susceptible to a major leak.

"You knew by the time that letter went out what you have said here today, that Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff was responsible," Wagner said. "This is why you have a real credibility problem."

Lawmakers also questioned MacDonald about other, unrelated leaks in the roofs of the I-93 tunnel system, but MacDonald declined to shoulder blame for that situation. There are at least 700 such leaks in the I-93 corridor, and water seeping, trickling, and pouring through them has begun to stain tunnel walls, corrode steel, short out overhead lights, and even spill onto the roadway.

Earlier this week, two engineering specialists hired by the Turnpike to assess the extent of the leak problem testified that the tunnels are structurally sound, but could deteriorate and become unsafe if a rigorous leak-patching and maintenance program were not in place. Such work, they said, could take a decade or more, and cost several million dollars.

The Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff testimony was the climax of this week's often-tense Joint Transportation Committee hearings, which sought to uncover not only the causes of the various wall and roof leaks, but also who is responsible for them, and whether the Turnpike Authority is willing to pursue Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff and contractors for the costs of the repairs.

Turnpike chairman Matthew J. Amorello, whom Governor Mitt Romney has asked to resign because of the leak debacle, testified yesterday that he is committed to pursuing the project managers as well as general contractors such as Modern Continental Co. of Cambridge for the cost of repairing the leaks and related damage. He also said that he now has Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff executives' assurances that the firm will approach its Big Dig work with the same attention to detail that it gives to the building of nuclear power plants.

But neither Amorello nor the Turnpike's Big Dig project director, Michael P. Lewis, could assure skeptical lawmakers that the managerial lapses that led to the wall leak in September would not happen again. "I cannot say that it would not happen again," said Lewis, who also told lawmakers, "I'm the one who's responsible; I'm the project director."

While Amorello testified that the Big Dig's budget has built-in contingencies for leak repairs and other unanticipated costs, he refused to say that the project's $14.6 billion cost estimate would hold until construction is finished late next year. He said the turnpike is still wrestling with contractors over hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns, some of which are related to the leaks.

In written testimony, a top official in the US Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General labeled the work of an
Amorello-appointed cost-recovery legal team "anemic" and called on the Legislature to create a bipartisan independent commission to investigate the cause of the leaks, who is responsible, and ensure "that they bear the costs of the leaks and not the taxpayers." Over roughly two years the cost-recovery team has recouped $3.5 million, out of more than $700 million in identified cost overruns attributed to mistakes or omissions.

The testimony, offered by Assistant Inspector General Debra S. Ritt, said Amorello's team, led by retired Judge Edward M. Ginsburg, had already investigated 13 leak-related cost overruns for "which the team determined there was no contractor liability."

"The Commonwealth must move expeditiously in identifying a solution," Ritt's testimony said. "If the leak problems are not resolved before the project's scheduled completion in September 2005, the Commonwealth may be saddled with significant maintenance and repair costs."

Ginsburg and his colleagues were scheduled to testify yesterday, but lawmakers spent so much time questioning Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff executives and Amorello that there was no time to do so. Baddour said he would make sure Ginsburg gets his say at a hearing in the near future. In the past, Ginsburg has maintained that his team is aggressively pursuing refunds for mistakes and shoddy construction, and has filed a dozen lawsuits -- including the one against Bechtel/Parsons
Brinckerhoff.

It was clear from the questioning yesterday that many legislators are no longer content to allow the turnpike to manage the leak negotiations with Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff and contractors. Several yesterday said they were supportive of the escrow account idea, an idea first floated by
Baddour.

Representative James M. Murphy, a Weymouth Democrat, said it's common in real estate transactions for money to go into escrow when a flaw is found in an about-to-be purchased house.

Representative Brian Knuuttila, a Gardner Democrat, said: "Do the escrow. The mileage you will get out of that is incredible."

"What we are concerned with is problems down the road, when you have packed up and gone," said Senator Robert L.
Hedlund, a Weymouth Republican.

Senator Mark C. Montigny, a New Bedford Democrat and one of Beacon Hill's harshest critics of Bechtel/Parsons
Brinckerhoff, said the private-sector managers had "outgunned and outsmarted" the state to avoid responsibility for mistakes.

Matthew J. Amorello looked nervous as he arrived at a packed State House hearing room yesterday morning. As the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority chairman sat down just before 10:30 a.m., he was sweating. He pulled out a white handkerchief and dabbed at his face repeatedly: his forehead, under his eyes, above his lip, and behind his ears.

Amorello has been under fire since last month, when Governor Mitt Romney called for his resignation after disclosure that the Big Dig's tunnels have hundreds of leaks.

But his appearance yesterday before lawmakers looked at times like the kind of cozy meeting among friends that has fueled public frustration over the $14.6 billion project.

Amorello's interrogators had reason to be friendly. The turnpike chief served with some of them as a state senator in the 1990s, and he still has firm friends on Beacon Hill, including Senate President Robert E. Travaglini.

"You and I go back many years," Representative Joseph F. Wagner, a Chicopee Democrat who is cochairman of the committee, said during his interrogation of
Amorello. "We served in the Legislature together. And you ... came in as the latest in a series of project managers the state has had. There has been a lot of change at the top of this project over the years.... I understand that you sit in a difficult position. You become the lightning rod. Some of it is beyond your ability to deal with it in terms of public perception."

"Having said that," Wagner continued. "You sit in the seat and with it goes all the responsibility."

Amorello nodded in agreement. The veteran of local politics, nattily dressed in a dark suit and pale green tie, appeared patient, and sometimes apologetic, during his testimony.

"The slurry wall breach is unacceptable," he said, again and again. "Each one we discover and find will be corrected and addressed," he repeated. "The responsible parties will pay."

Committee members saved their harshest words for Bechtel/Parsons
Brinckerhoff, the private-sector manager of the project, which Senator Mark C.
Montigny, a New Bedford Democrat, called, "the Halliburton of the construction industry."

Romney also drew criticism: Wagner accused the governor of "demagogueing on this issue."

Last month, Romney had said that Amorello's departure was "the only way to restore confidence" in the project. Amorello stood his ground against Romney, saying "there is no justifiable reason" for his departure.

Even before news of the leaks emerged, Romney targeted Amorello as a symbol of patronage on Beacon Hill. The governor has been trying to merge the Turnpike Authority with the Massachusetts Highway department, a move many saw as an attempt to oust
Amorello, who was appointed by Acting Governor Jane Swift in 2002.

Romney also blocked Amorello's plans to hold a lavish gala to celebrate the opening of the Big Dig tunnels in 2003.

Yesterday, legislators did occasionally turn up the heat on Amorello, at one point chiding him for failing to recoup more than a few million dollars from Bechtel/Parsons
Brinckerhoff, even though it expects to reap $150 million in profits over the life of the 20-year mega-project.

Some expressed displeasure when Amorello and other turnpike officers admitted that they still had to rely mostly on Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff oversight of the project and that a slurry-wall leak like the one that sent water gushing onto the roadway on Sept. 15 could happen again.

When Amorello was unable to come up with an answer during the more than two hours of questioning, he deferred to one of the many engineers and project managers who accompanied him. At one point, he scanned the packed, stifling room, searching for someone.

"There are so many people in here," he remarked.

"There's a lot of money being spent in this room today," said Senator Robert L.
Hedlund, a Weymouth Republican.

Amorello's patience did not appear to flag, though his water supply did. Close to the end, he peered at the small water bottles near his microphone. They were all empty.

Hungry and low on water, the legislators also appeared ready to let him go.

"Everyone seems to be looking forward to the fireworks with Bechtel," Montigny said.

Done at last, Amorello and about a dozen of his people left, and as he began climbing a marble staircase, he turned around.

A firm that lobbies for Big Dig contractor Bechtel/Parsons-Brinckerhoff is preparing a fund-raiser for newly installed House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi next week, as the company weathers the political fallout from the discovery of leaks in the tunnel project.

On Monday morning, Thomas P. O'Neill III, head of lobbying powerhouse O'Neill and Associates, will host a fund-raising breakfast at the firm's Beacon Street offices for
DiMasi. Named on the invitation is Andrew Paven, the O'Neill employee who is Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff's lobbyist and spokesman. The invitation suggests contributions of $100, $250, and $500.

Companies associated with the beleaguered Central Artery project have become political hot potatoes recently. US Representative Michael E. Capuano recently returned $2,000 he had received from Bechtel donors. Also, Governor Mitt Romney last week canceled a fund-raiser that was to be hosted by construction magnate Jay
Cashman, who recently began an association with Big Dig contractor Modern Continental Construction.

But the speaker sees no problem with the O'Neill fund-raiser, his spokeswoman said yesterday.

"I am informed by the speaker's campaign that it is strictly an O'Neill and Associates event," said Kim
Haberlin. "Tom O'Neill, who is a longtime friend of the speaker, is the lead sponsor, and Bechtel has no part in this event. O'Neill has over 60 clients. I think this is a bit of a stretch. Is every event Andy Paven sponsors a Bechtel event?"

According to records from the secretary of state's office, O'Neill and Associates and Paven are registered as lobbyists for Bechtel/Parsons
Brinckerhoff. O'Neill and Associates also has many other clients with business on Beacon Hill.

Paven said he lobbies for Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff in Washington, but is merely a spokesman for the partnership in Massachusetts.

"I don't lobby the State House for Bechtel/Parsons-Brinckerhoff," he said.

And there will be no officials of the group at Monday's fund-raiser, Paven said.

"I have not even sent Bechtel people invitations," he said. He cited the return of the Capuano contributions as an indication of the wariness with which the Big Dig overseer is being treated lately.

"Bechtel has outsmarted us, outgunned us, and ... ripped us off," said Senator Mark
Montigny, a New Bedford Democrat on the committee.

The committee's cochairman -- Joseph Wagner, a Chicopee Democrat -- said the project has been "one big black mark on the Commonwealth." Another legislator called it "a black hole."

Many on the committee repeatedly asked the Turnpike Authority chairman, Matthew J.
Amorello, why he had not done more to publicly hold Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff to account for what they saw as mismanagement and cost overruns on the
megaproject, whose cost has ballooned to $14.625 billion. Officials of the management group, along with lawyers and lobbyists seated in four short rows at yesterday's hearing, were mostly stony-faced.

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